


hospitals and hotel rooms (are both temporary, if you're lucky)

by theoneandonlybunny



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Female Peter Parker, Gen, Hurt Tony Stark, Sick Tony Stark, but the hurt is off-screen? And it’s not really hurt?, this isn't teen because of cursing or violence or sex but because the subject is kinda intense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:46:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28054857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoneandonlybunny/pseuds/theoneandonlybunny
Summary: Tony gets sick while Penny is away, and she doesn't handle it well.
Relationships: Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Comments: 1
Kudos: 28





	hospitals and hotel rooms (are both temporary, if you're lucky)

Penny was a superhero. There was so much she could do that other people couldn’t, so much that even other superheroes couldn’t do, and yet even she couldn’t escape this.

She was stuck on the other side of the country, unable to do anything while her mentor/father-figure was in the hospital, seriously ill.

Penny was out there on business. She was working with a lab in Silicon Valley on an experiment and they’d just gotten it to a crucial point. If she left now, the experiment would be ruined and months of hard work would need to be scrapped and redone.

The soonest she could leave would be in a few days, and she spent every spare second she had watching the phone. Pepper promised to call her if anything happened, and the last time they’d spoken, Tony was in serious kidney failure because of all the damage he’d taken over the years.

His kidneys were seriously compromised when he was poisoned by the palladium, and that meant he’d developed a lot of kidney stones over the years. That and other factors meant he’d developed a kidney stone too big for doctors to break up and it was blocking his ability to produce urine.

Last Pepper said, they were close to putting him on dialysis. Doctors were going to put a stint in above the kidney, and Penny knew better than to Google everything about kidney failure and let WebMD scare her into thinking it was much worse than it was. After all, on WebMD a simple cough could be tuberculosis. A headache could be brain cancer.

Penny ended up researching everything she could, anyway. Rationality and the experience she had with science didn’t mean much in the face of her dad being sick.

Days went by without much news, which Penny supposed was a good thing, but in the absence of more information her brain tortured her with what-ifs and possibilities. Her dad had almost died so many times, after all. What if he wasn’t going to make it back from this? What if she was spending what could have been his last hours on this Earth stuck playing around in the lab when she could have been at his side, making sure he knew she was there and that she loved him?

Penny said as much to MJ during a video chat, and MJ had this terrible look on her face – sympathy mixed with understanding and love. It made Penny’s heart hurt to see the expression.

“Pen, it’s going to be okay,” MJ assured her. “Your dad is getting care. They caught this before it was too late. He’s got the best doctors in the world working on him. He’s going to live and keep living, and then when he gets out you can yell at him for scaring all of us.”

“I think Pepper and Morgan will do that for me,” Penny said, smiling weakly. “I can’t believe Morgan is 17 now, you know? She’s been trying to get the specs on the medical equipment they have him hooked up to, to see if she can make it better. More efficient, I guess – her texts haven’t been making much sense.”

“I get it,” MJ said. “This is going to be hard on both of you for different reasons. You – you have your own issues on this, and how you didn’t get to say goodbye to your uncle. How fast it was. For her, though, it’s her first time on this rodeo. She’s never seen her dad like this before.”

Penny buried her head in her hands, trying to blink away tears that were on the verge of being shed. “I’m such a bad daughter,” she said, her voice breaking. “I should be there. I should be there with him and Pepper and Morgan.”

MJ frowned. “Baby – no. No, you aren’t, and if Tony were able to talk to you right now he would tell you the same thing. You’re not a bad daughter just because you can’t immediately drop everything and fly home right now.”

“Sure I am,” Penny said, frustration leaking into her voice. “He’s done so much for me, and I can’t – I can’t –”

There was that look again, of sympathy and love and understanding, but Penny couldn’t see it well. She started crying, and soon what started as a few choked sobs turned into a full breakdown, as the stress and the worry bled through her entire being.

“Oh – oh Penny,” MJ said, from her side of the tablet. MJ was still in New York with their little girl, a child they adopted a few years after they got married. As an orphan, Penny had a heart for kids in bad situations, and the baby was given up because her mom was in a bad way.

They offered an open adoption but the mom couldn’t take it – said she needed the adoption to be a clean break. Penny and MJ respected her wishes, and because of that they were Mom and Mama to May, a beautiful little redheaded toddler with a lot of curiosity and even more energy.

Penny missed her wife and their daughter even more now. She needed her wife’s embrace and May’s little arms hugging her in this moment.

When the tears stopped, Penny walked off-camera for a few moments to find tissues to dry her eyes and blow her nose. The crying session took off most of her makeup and trying to clean herself up finished off the rest; when she was done, Penny’s face was bright red and rather vulnerable looking.

“Penny,” MJ said, as soon as Penny was calm enough to hear her, “it’s going to be okay. The experiment will be over in a few days. You’ve been working yourself ragged to make sure this goes well, and the stress is hitting you at the same time this news is. The experiment will end and you’ll be able to come home and yell at Tony for putting you through this, and then he’ll make a bad joke about how he didn’t plan this, and he’ll grill you for details about what happened in Silicon Valley and if you managed to show up the engineers from Tesla.”

“Please,” Penny said, laughing a little, “I sent them home on the first day. They were unprepared and they didn’t have the skills they said they did. I’m working with student teams out of UCLA and Berkley who have a better idea of what’s going on than they did.”

“Exactly,” MJ said, “and when this is all over you get to tell him that. Pepper will let you know if he gets critical, Pen. And besides – medical technology has come so far in these past few years. They might be printing him a new kidney for all we know.”

“He’d like that,” Penny agreed, the bright red leaving her face as she calmed down. “Hey, babe, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have –”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence, Parker, or I’ll tell Ned you were the reason the college lab blew up when you were both at MIT. So help me I will.”

“I mean, I’m fairly certain he knows anyway,” Penny said, “but I get the message. Hey, I have to go make myself presentable again, but thank you for this. I… I didn’t know how much I needed to get that off my chest.”

“Anytime, love,” MJ said. “Anytime.”

The rest of the experiment went off without a hitch and soon, Penny was on a plane and heading home. By the time she was able to be with Pepper and Morgan, Tony was feeling better with two brand-new, 3D-printed kidneys, and even though he was going to need a lot of help and care through the next several days and weeks, the doctors said he was on the mend.

And when Tony saw Penny, he gave her a big hug, asked about the experiment and then asked how MJ and Little May were doing. Happy and Aunt May had already stopped by to check on him earlier that day, and Rhodey was flying in from DC in a day or two.

It wasn’t the way anyone wanted to have family reunions, but they were all back together and they were doing alright. Tony was doing alright.

They all got a little more time with their favorite genius billionaire philanthropist playboy.

**Author's Note:**

> This is entirely based on current events in my real life. My dad is in the hospital with kidney failure, and the procedures I described Tony going through are entirely based off what my mother told me my dad is going through right now. He already had a mini-stroke this year, so this is his second health crisis that I've just had to watch from the opposite coast.
> 
> He and I don't have nearly the relationship I write Penny and Tony having -- he isn't nearly as open to queer relationships as Tony is, and that's caused a lot of tension and a lot of issues -- but he's still my dad. For all the shit he put me through, I still love him.


End file.
